Methodology

Political methodology deals with all issues related to empirical political research (nonempirical work, such as pure formal or normative theory, is excluded here). Methodology, as it is understood here, simply refers to the ways in which we acquire knowledge and comprises a multitude of specific methods and techniques. As such, it is embedded in an epistemological tradition of “critical rationalism” (Karl Popper) and “scientific realism.” This has been summarized as the “twofold conviction that the world consists of causal mechanisms that exist independently of our study—or even awareness—of them, and that the methods of science hold our best possibility of our grasping their true character” (Ian Shapiro, 2005, pp. 8–9). While it is often confused with narrower topics such as statistics, methodology is a broad area that deals with every aspect of political research, both quantitative and qualitative. While some methodological issues are more relevant to certain subfields or types of research, all political science is subject to similar standards and logic. While political methodology is related to more general social science methodology, there are specific issues that distinguish political methodology, while there is, of course, a shared logic and standards across the empirical social sciences. Since political science is itself defined by substantive questions, there is much importing of methods from other disciplines into political science. Questions of what is imported and the relevance of imported methods are important issues in political methodology. This entry discusses some of the major advances in this field.

While political methodology deals with empirical research, there cannot be any purely empirical research. Every empirical study involves some relationship between a theoretical concept and its empirical referent. Even very narrow empirical research, such as the measurement of electoral turnout in a given locality in a given period, requires a theoretical assessment of what is electoral turnout. For example, are people who are of legal age to vote but excluded from the process because of a prior felony (as some are in the United States) counted in the denominator? While empirical studies of voting turnout are less complex theoretically than studies of, say, whether being a democracy causes a nation to be more pacific, both studies involve a mix of theoretical and empirical analysis and both can be assessed using the same logic. Thus, issues of measurement are always critical; such issues have become even more critical as technology makes new forms of data (video, blogs) available, or it makes it possible to easily analyze data that we have always used but found hard to deal with (text). The ability to deal with new sources of very complicated data and, with modern computers, the ability to code massive amounts of nonquantitative data, as well as the ability to collect individual data via the Internet, are among the most exciting developments in political methodology. Along with this, there has been much progress on issues of measurement.

Similarly, there can be no difference in the underlying logic of qualitative and quantitative [Page 1558]research. While obviously the specific tools will be different, if the question of interest is why countries have differing regulatory systems, we may pursue this in a number of ways. But, in the end, all such studies must be able to answer whether the evidence used leads to the conclusion asserted. While process tracing through official papers of decision makers is different from regressing regulatory rules on political variables, both may use one type of quantitative method, while students of cross-national comparative politics may use another type; these subfields are also subject to the same fundamental logic. This point has been forcefully made in recent years in important books by Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba and by Henry Brady and David Collier. The interrelationship (both similarities and dissimilarities) between quantitative and qualitative analysis, and how to combine both types to improve research, is another research area in political methodology that is seeing much discussion.

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